This was my highly anticipated trip to the salt. No real reason to hit Monmouth County but I have looking to fish some crab flies early in the morning. The alarm clock went of at 330 am and I was soon on my way east on 195. A quick stop at WaWa near Great Adventure and I was all caffeined up.
When I arrived I was hopeful for a good morning. It was an hour into the drop, the skies were overcast due to the smoke from Canada, but there was a nasty swell with rollers that ran up the beach scarp to Ocean Avenue. There were no signs of life, no bait, birds, or fish. But I was confident.
Let me talk about those rollers up the scarp. First, and I blame beach replenishment, the waves break right at your feet on the sloping scarp, dam near cutting your ankles out from underneath you. Then the
back-flow that runs back to the ocean dam near has you hydroplaning and losing your balance. There has been so much sand lost already just wait until a few of those fall nor'easter's hit these fabricated beaches. It's insanity that Frank Pallone has been down with this for decades, but I digress.
As the blood orange sun tried to burn its way through the smoke I settled in next to a groin. I had a dry/dropper set-up of a crab and white bait type fly. The tiny fluke must have hit it on the beach scarp because I didn't know I was "tight" until I picked up my line. I was ready for the party to begin...I'm glad I got one. As the hours went the tide didn't seem to drop that much and receding waves tempted me to take a few steps closer, kind of like a bug looking into a bug light, and then the swell would roll in.
In my desperation I went with an Ugly Ass Fly because it always produces, well not today. If the fish were in the trough, if there even was one, getting the fly to them wasn't easy. Again, the swell just made it not fun. These were not conditions to use crab flies, maybe later in the tide, but by then the beach people would have arrived to kick off the holiday weekend. In desperation I switched fly lines and went
a popper thinking maybe a bass would see it looking up, but that didn't happen. I can honestly say if I don't have another reason to be down that way I'll just wait till the fall. At least for beach fishing.
After some taking care of business I thought about the river. For late June it has been good to me so thank you to Mother Nature for the several inches of rain that started last week. It bumped the river, kept the temps down, and turned on the fish, at least for me anyway. The river dropped another 2,000
cfs so now we're sitting at just over 10,000, down from 20,000 less than a week ago. So what does that mean? Changing conditions. Skinny and very warm water is to come, yet again. Yesterday the water was 72 today it jumped to 75.
I was able to catch a mid-day high to outgoing tide and on the first fly drop I had a wolf pack attack. So I set up the tank and re-grouped because I knew at least one was going to make it in. I fished for just about three hours and probably played with a dozen and a half fish. When they would swing and miss
at a fly I would change patterns. I did that probably 10 times. The good thing about the dropping tide is fish drop back as the drain plug gets opened so the spots get re-inhabited often. Between the strike outs, there were a bunch of missed hook sets, one broke off, and a few became unglued.
One fly that got a lot of love was a Jim Matson jig fly that you can see hanging out of the below fishes mouth. I am glad I always remember to flatten down the barbs, it makes hook outs so easy.
So now what? The river will be unfishable by mid-week. I'm not driving down to the beach until the fall. We're heading to the Cape for the weekend. So what about fishing....snakehead time! We'll see.